(via mylonelylittlesecret)
(via thejokersfavour)
While watching Inception I realized that Mal (as played by Marion Cotillard) was a specter not only of the character Dom Cobb’s dead wife but of someone who wasn’t technically in the movie at all—Heath Ledger. Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is a doppelganger of the film’s director Christopher Nolan—who also directed Ledger in the The Dark Knight. I believe that Nolan injected himself into Inception via Cobb so that he could make leave his memory of the beautiful and tragic Ledger amongst the crumbling ruins of the cinematic art they created together.
In the same way that Cobb wrestles with the guilt of having “planted the seed of the idea” in Mal that their dream underworld wasn’t real—an idea so powerful that it led her to question the reality of the world they returned to upon waking up—Nolan enabled Ledger to carry out the character of the Joker to its fullest, most psychopathic, Uber-mensch potential—entering a post-morality nullified space of primitive and apocalyptic evil. The Dark Knight’s cinematographer told the NY Times:
Mr. Pfister, the cinematographer, said Mr. Ledger seemed “like he was busting blood vessels in his head,” he was so intense. “It was like a séance, where the medium takes on another person and then is so completely drained.”
In both cases the break with reality was so severe it was described using the language of possession. The role of The Joker took hold of Ledger in the same way that the idea that reality wasn’t real blossomed inside Mal’s unconscious. Another similarity is that Mal and Ledger’s subsequent deaths were never confirmed as suicides, in part because of alterations made to the scene. Neither left a note—the hallmark of a suicide and the absence of which seems to curtail labeling a death as such. In the case of Ledger, however, insinuations about this possibility continued to be made in light of oddities surrounding his demise—including the prolonged time it took to contact 911. This resonates with Mal’s strategy of staging her suicide to look like a fight that ended in murder—recklessly implicating Cobb in a bid to convince her husband to join her in “waking up.”
In addition to these powerful parallels there’s a strong physical resemblance between Cobb and Nolan that seems to further bind the director’s identification with his character. A Google image search of “Christopher Nolan” turns up a still from Inception in which DiCaprio ‘s Cobb is in a dark suit and tie that matches a number of the images of Nolan. The two also sport the same dapper, combed back blond hair. The “real-life” Christopher Nolan appears almost as an understudy to his own main character.
Are these similarities purposeful? Did Nolan knowingly select an actor and create for him a character with whom he had psychological and physical similarities? Was this the case in the Batman movies (Christian Bale) and Memento (Guy Pearce) as well? Did Nolan openly think of Mal as Ledger, or was this pairing hidden to him? If he didn’t “know”, then do these doublings point to a set of thinly veiled traumas in Nolan’s psyche, or does being an artist mean that someone is always bringing up something of themselves with whatever they create-at least the ones who aren’t playing it safe?
In movies, just as in dreams, doublings and doppelgangers are clues to unconscious activity that can be found both inside and outside of the frame. Freud referred to doublings as uncanny harbingers of death. The Cobb/Nolan and Mal/Ledger doublings have the aura of death all around them. This is not an intimation of a physical end but of an existential untethering in which a person’s soul is lost for an eternity in limbo. This can be felt when Cobb/Nolan takes the new architect Ariadne in an old-fashioned elevator down to the lowest level of his mind. (The name Ariadne is a clue to the scene’s resonances with the Greek myth of Orpheus, who was allowed to rescue Eurydice from the underworld as long as he didn’t look at her—something he is unable to do, thereby losing her forever.) Cobb/Nolan pulls back the metal accordion door and reveals a beach scene where he keeps his guilt infected memories of Mal remixed with a fleeting sample of the last glimpse he had of his children. In addition to the guilt Cobb/Nolan feels, he also has to resist the desire to disappear into the memory of what he and Mal/Ledger (i.e. “Evil Ledger”) created—a dark universe and a dark cinema without boundaries or regard for the everyday world. A place of pure creation where anything was possible. Inception is in part the story of Cobb/Nolan’s journey back home from the precipice overlooking that underworld—in the end, the director and his doppelganger remain true to the script and bring the plot back home to the “real” waking world populated by living children and human relationships.
Mal is a trickster who appears at the exact right/wrong moment in order to foil whatever heist Dom is trying to pull off. Ledger was also a trickster—i.e, “The Joker”—who threw a wrench into the idea of a movie based on a comic book being a safe, contained form of escapism. The evil that Ledger channeled was TRUE: it spilled out from the screen and was felt by everyone in its proximity. This included the pedestrians who packed theaters, pouring in from the hyper brightness of malls and fast food places, turning off cell phones and reclining with their popcorn and ironically understood, pop culture contextualized, Hollywood fueled desires that over the course of the movie were simultaneously fulfilled and emptied of meaning by Ledger and his demonic channel.
Mal is a gorgeous angry ghost—an avenging memory that terrorizes and comforts Cobb with her presence. The are lovers as she explains to Ariadne—they make each other whole. She seems to glow with cinematic energy in her iconic non-existence. She appears on screen as a classic Hollywood beauty, from her skin to her accent—and yet we know all along that she merely exists as a projection of Cobb/Nolan, in the same way that audiences watched Ledger appear larger than life in The Dark Knight while knowing he was dead.
There are those who will dismiss this reading as callous and insensitive to the memory of Leger. They will claim, quite rightly, that we can never know what drove Ledger to OD—he might have been messed up over something else entirely. They will argue that it was an accident, and that I’m doing an injustice by stating otherwise. I’m in agreement and attest that I’m not making any claims except that the line between what is real and not-real has never been as distinct as we’d like to believe.
As we learn in Inception, the most powerful ideas are the ones that slip into our unconscious as seeds that take root and grow into our consciousness as parasites disguised as our own inspirations. It doesn’t make a difference if the ideas are from a fictitious or a real source—our mind treats it as though it originated from inside of it. We think we are in control but we aren’t. The experience of Inception reveals that the joke is on us all, including the director. The maze of the movie turns into feedback waves radiating out from the experience of watching it. The question of which came first, the movie or the dream, becomes as impossible to answer as it is to walk up one of Inception’s never ending staircases.
